What Women Can Do to Close the Retirement Savings Gap

Every individual knows that they need to save both for their short term as well as their long term. Unfortunately, however, multiple studies indicate that women lag consistently behind men when it comes to retirement savings.

One theory behind this is that women spend more time out of the workforce in order to care for members of their own family which means they have some years with no income or very little income. Retirement assets need to have a single owner and cannot be titled as joint accounts. There is a way for married women who leave the working world, however, to continue saving for their future retirement. A spousal IRA is one such option. This enables an unemployed spouse to fund an IRA with income that has been earned from the working spouse.

Even though the individual needs to have taxable compensation in order to contribute to retirement accounts, the IRS does have exceptions for married couples who are filing joint income tax returns and have household income that will cover the total volume of IRA contributions made in each spouse’s names.

The spousal IRA is not much different from a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA. In 2017 you’re eligible to contribute up to $5500 if you are under age 50 and up to $6500 if you are age 50 or older. Contact an experienced estate planning attorney in Ohio to ensure that all of your retirement accounts have appropriately listed beneficiaries so that if something happens to you, there is a clear plan for those items.